Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

Only quick hits today, I'm afraid, my darlings.

But this one's pretty fascinating: McCain's campaign seems to be awfully damned friendly with lobbyists who are in bed with brutal military regimes:

...John McCain had to accept the resignation of Doug Goodyear, the man he tapped to manage the Republican National Convention, after reports surfaced that Goodyear’s lobbying firm represented Burma’s brutal military junta.

But Goodyear simply ran the firm. What about the specific lobbyist who actually worked on the junta’s behalf? As it turns out, that would be Doug Davenport who, you guessed it, also works for John McCain’s campaign. (Davenport is a regional campaign manager for McCain, overseeing the operation in mid-Atlantic states.)

Apparently hoping to clear this unpleasantness up before the weekend’s over, Goodyear resigned yesterday afternoon, and Davenport resigned this morning.

This sounds like some exquisite salt to pour into wounds. Let's be sure to rub this in whenever McCain starts bleating about how much he hates lobbyists, eh?

In the Dishonest Assmuch of the Day category, we have the far right wing Business & Media Institute playing silly buggers with the splicing machine:

Wingers sure are weird. The Wonk Room documents how one of Brent Bozell's media watchdog groups spliced together an NPR interview with Al Gore to make it sound like he was blaming the recent devastating cyclone in Burma on global warming. In the audio splice, they play the end of the interview followed by the start of the interview without any indication that they're taking his words out of order.

But what makes this weird, as opposed to just mendacious in a garden variety way, is that they didn't need to do it. Gore was careful to acknowledge that no individual storm can be blamed on global warming, but he followed that up by saying that global warming is responsible for a trend toward more powerful storms and that the Burma cyclone is an example of that. So why bother splicing the tape dishonestly?

Beats me. Maybe it's just in their blood.

Kevin Drum seems to have them nailed.

And finally, for your reading pleasure and vast amusement at Bush's expense, Carpetbagger reports why their crummy little War on Terror is completely, totally, batshitinsanely, stupid and wrong:

When it comes to analyzing the seriousness of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, Michael Sheehan seems like the kind of guy whose perspective should matter. He’s fought guerrillas in Central America as a U.S. Army Green Beret in 1980s; he was an NSC official under both H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton; and he was the ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism from 1998 to
2000.

Sheehan has a new book out, “Crush the Cell: How to Defeat Terrorism Without Terrorizing Ourselves,” which touts a provocative thesis — we didn’t take al Qaeda seriously enough before 9/11, and it “just isn’t the existential-twilight-struggle threat it’s often cracked up to be” now.

I somehow doubt the Bushies are going to appreciate Sheehan's conclusions. All the more reason to think Sheehan's right.